Whether you are authoring a traditional desktop or web-based application, you have to deal with asynchronous and event-based programming from time to time. Desktop applications have I/O operations and computationally expensive tasks that might take a long
time to complete and potentially block other active threads. Furthermore, handling exceptions, cancellation, and synchronization is difficult and error-prone.

Because observable sequences are data streams, you can query them using standard LINQ query operators implemented by the Observable extension methods.
Thus you can filter, project, aggregate, compose and perform time-based operations on multiple events easily by using these standard LINQ operators. In addition, there are a number of other reactive stream specific operators that allow powerful queries to
be written. Cancellation, exceptions, and synchronization are also handled gracefully by using the extension methods provided by Rx.

Rx complements and interoperates smoothly with both synchronous data streams (IEnumerable<T>) and single-value asynchronous computations (Task<T>) as the following diagram shows:

Single return value

Multiple return values

Pull/Synchronous/Interactive

T

IEnumerable<T>

Push/Asycnhrounous/Reactive

Task<T>

IObservable<T>

Additional documentation, video, tutorials and HOL are available on MSDN.

What is included

The project includes the following libraries:

Reactive Extensions:

Rx.rb: The Reactive Extensions (Rx) for Ruby is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences and LINQ-style query operators.

You can contribute by reviewing and sending feedback on code checkins, suggesting and trying out new features as they are implemented, submit bugs and help us verify fixes as they are checked in, as well as submit code fixes or code contributions
of your own. Note that all code submissions will be rigorously reviewed and tested by the Rx Team, and only those that meet an extremely high bar for both quality and design/roadmap appropriateness will be merged into the source.

You will need to sign a
Contributor License Agreementbefore submitting your pull request. To complete the Contributor License Agreement
(CLA), you will need to submit a request via the form (select "Reactive Extensions") and then electronically sign the Contributor License Agreement when you receive the email containing the link to the document. This needs to only be done once for
any Microsoft Open Technologies OSS project.